No, Drum Mage still isn’t done. But it’s closer than it was a month ago, and I know where it’s going from here. I’ll be working on it more today, and I’ll post a final wordcount tonight before I log off.

>About a month ago, I volunteered to go in to J’s school and speak as a writer. Today was the day, and I spoke for an hour to over a hundred 4th graders on writing, on what a writer’s day is like, on how you go from idea to story and on publishing. It was a blast! The kids asked some good questions, and a number of them left talking very animatedly about wanting to be writers when they grew up.

Now, I did make a point of not bringing in any of my own writing, and I was upfront with them that I was a romance writer, that I did not write for their age-group, and my writing was targeted at ages 18 and up. (So if any of you reading now are LME parents, wanting to see who it was that spoke to your kids today, please rest assured that I kept to the facts of writing and publishing, and I didn’t bring any of my OWN writing into it, except in the most general terms of story development. I have a four-year-old. I KNOW how to keep the discussions g-rated!)

Oh, and if you are here from LME, that young adult writer I mentioned was Tamora Pierce. The BEST writer of girls fantasy I know. Look her up!